This summer we found ourselves hosting a teenage party for our 18-year-old son. We had vaguely promised Ben a birthday party at some misty, indeterminate time in the future and for years we had had an endless series of good reasons for postponement: Wait till your GCSEs are over. Wait till we’ve moved house. Wait till the weather is better.

But this summer his GCSEs were over and so were his AS levels and A levels. We had renovated our house and moved back in. The weather was glorious, and the forecasts were good. We had run out of excuses.

Ben got the bit between his teeth. He and a friend started making playlists and rigging up lighting in the garage. He made a party invitation page on Facebook, “date still undecided”. Every day he was on to us. “How about Friday the 8th? The 9th? No? Then the 15th? The 16th. Hey, the summer will be over soon! You promised …”

Eventually we caved in. How could we say no? Ben hadn’t had a party since he was nine. And he was a boy who had had difficulty in the past making friends – though now, of course, everybody was his friend.

“You must be mad,” said my sister. “You’ve done up your house. Now you’re having a party so his friends can trash it.”

In my mind were other, even more hellish scenarios: teams of aggressive gatecrashers, drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, fights in the garden (we back on to a sheltered housing complex for senior citizens). Most of all I feared the drinking – today’s teenagers binge on vodka like Russians. I didn’t want a corpse on my hands.

So what did we do? My husband Lewis and I gritted our teeth. Ben’s party was something we were just going to have to get through, like childbirth or a Victorian illness. And if we were going to survive, we needed to take a tactical approach. We prepared a battle plan and ordered supplies, then we tied ourselves to the mast and entered the high seas.

In the event, we survived. The party was a roaring success. The neighbours shut their windows and claim to have slept through all of it (except one long wolf howl at 2am). Nobody ended up in A&E, though I did spend a worrying half hour trying to rouse an unconscious boy in the bathroom. And there was only minor damage to the garden – plants trodden on and a plum tree annoyingly stripped of unripe plums.

We emerged older and wiser, and probably greyer. Here is my survival guide to teenage parties. Obviously if your child plays the cello and likes to curl up with the Iliad then it may not be much use. But if you are the owner of a run of the mill feckless teenager, this is what you need to know:

Be there

This sounds blindingly obvious, but you would be amazed by how many parents let their teenagers have parties in their absence.

It’s a mistake. Teenagers don’t go to parties just to drink, talk and dance and pick up new partners. Of course they do all of that – and to excess. But a party is also an opportunity to experiment, a quest for new experiences, a license to do everything they have never dared to attempt at home.

They are brimming with energy, curiosity and untapped athleticism. So they will hang off your scaffolding and have sword fights with your curtain poles and slide head first down your banisters. Their Gollum-like little fingers will be everywhere, stealing pills in the bathroom, tipping out spice jars, melting plastic spoons over your cooker and rifling your search engines for pornography.

In fact, you should be at home all the time. If you leave your teenagers alone for a weekend, they will take it as tacit consent to hold a Facebook party. About six months ago, when we were still living in a rented house, we went to Wales leaving Ben and his younger brother Matt alone for two nights. They were 18 and 16 – we thought old enough to look after each other. I worried that Matt might be lonely. I kept calling on the Saturday to see that he was OK. I got no answer.

I returned on Sunday evening. The house was bizarrely tidy. There were some new scuff marks on the staircase and the kitchen floor felt sticky under foot – it was sticky, of course, from spilled chasers.

Matt, hang-dog expression, love bite the size of Iceland on his neck, said “Uuh, A few people came round.”

How many?

“About 35. And my phone has gone.”

You will always know

I doubt any teenager can hold a sneaky party without you finding out. They’ll always leave something. Matt had forgotten an empty bottle of Malibu under the sofa. And someone had slept in my bed and left lemon drops stuck to the sheets.

Even highly housetrained teenagers will miss something. A friend of a friend came back from a weekend away. Her house was suspiciously tidy. She looked everywhere, but still couldn’t fault her teenage daughter. She just knew there had been a party.

In the evening the woman turned on her electric blanket. Later when she went to bed, she peeled back the duvet to find a pool of vomit steaming gently in the heat.

Don’t host it alone

You cannot single handedly patrol and host a teenage party. Have at least one other adult present. If there is an emergency – eg, you need to take a child to hospital – you will need a spare guard.

Control Facebook

If your child is going to have a party page on Facebook insist that the privacy setting is on Invite Only. Do not allow them to click Open Invitation or Public – that is how you end up with 2,000 people on your doorstep. Also prohibit the Guests and Friends setting which means that the guests are at liberty to send on the invitation to their own friends. That is how you get 500 on your doorstep.

Even with Invite Only you still have to pray the invitation doesn’t go viral.

Limit numbers

Another no-brainer. Guest lists are like builders’ estimates, so allow for a 50 to 100% increase on any limit that you set. I said 35 max. After special pleading, Lewis agreed to 50. Somewhere between 85 and 90 came.

Insist on plenty of girls

Make sure there are lots of girls at the party - they can be a civilising influence. Photograph: Seb Oliver/ Seb Oliver/cultura/Corbis

Mostly girls are a civilising influence, as well as less foul-mouthed. But they will also be the ones bringing in most of the spirits, and their heels can do savage damage. Girls also tend to come underdressed – I handed out lots of blankets.

One advantage is that girls can be quite tender-hearted towards the drunks. In the end it was a ravishing girl who coaxed the boy in the bathroom back to consciousness.

Safety and security

If you are supplying beer and cider (as we did) keep them within sight, otherwise the drink may be stolen and taken on to another party.

Put out ashtrays, bins for the cans, bowls for the vomit. Avoid glass and provide paper plates and plastic cups. If you have a cellar, lock it. Ditto filing cabinets, attic hatches, manhole covers etcetera.

Try to remember what you were like at 17. Lewis, having once upon a time been an eager placer of traffic cones on statues, had a good eye for dangerous, fun things they could do. He insisted we moved piles of building rubble from the back of the house and we picked up stray nails and any sharp bits of metal that they might lurch into. We lit slippery steps with plastic LED fake rocks (three for £10 from B&Q).

Keep party-goers out of your house

Ideally hire a village hall or community centre. That way you won’t have to spend the evening patrolling bedrooms and then fork out to have the carpets steam-cleaned. Also, the party will end at a more defined, determined time that you can claim is outside your control.

Regrettably we didn’t do this. We held Ben’s party at home – we have a big garden and a garage and, in addition, a friend lent us a marquee. But we had to let the guests in to use the downstairs toilet – and that was our undoing. We tried to barricade the rest of the house – we even put up No Entry signs. But the downstairs loo queue grew enormous and it seemed ungracious not to let kids I’ve known since they were at primary school into my kitchen. And once you’ve let one in, they all come.

Now I know better. If you want to keep them outside, get a Portaloo. Better still, two Portaloos. There also has to be somewhere – a tent? Garage? – where the girls can leave their bags. The bags contain their personal supplies of spirits and possibly a pair of shoes that they can walk in. If you let their bags into the house, you’ll have them traipsing back and forth all night.

Provide carbohydrates

Feed them. It is much harder to get dangerously drunk or high on a full stomach. I recommend the bulk baking of cheese and tomato pizzas that you cut up very quickly with a roller and take out on trays. This gives you an excuse for patrolling the darker recesses of your party (in our case, the bottom of the garden).

Also, giving food to the guests makes them more beholden to you. You are no longer a faceless, hostile parent and they may be slightly less inclined to damage your property.

I think pizzas are the best option. We also bought several kilos of bratwurst and fried them and stuffed them into rolls. This was less successful. You can only fry a score of sizzling bratwurst before your hand is brown as a kipper and the smell has penetrated every hair follicle. Also the teenagers start requesting ketchup and mustard; both are very staining.

Avoid food with projectile possibilities. I stupidly put out a big bowl of tangerines. One was thrown into the toilet and caused a blockage. A month on I’m still finding flattened tangerines in the garden.

Consider a mixologist

Friends hired a mixologist for their son’s 18th birthday. He was German and very glamorous. He made showy cocktails with a shaker and added paper umbrellas and maraschino cherries, salt rims, slivers of lime etcetera. The teenagers loved it all. As they got drunker, the mixologist gradually reduced the alcohol content in their drinks. Conclusion: pricey but worth it.

Expect damage

Expect some of the damage to be quite unexpected. I was baffled as to why the lower leaves of a rhododendron had been pulled off and carefully piled up to make a little tower. And one guest had unpicked the side seam of one of the sitting room curtains. What was that about?

The morning after

You want the guests to go away feeling good about the party so provide a vast fried breakfast and industrial quantities of cheap croissants. To the hungover, distribute coffee, sugary tea, Alka Seltzer, sympathy.

Set up a table for lost belongings. Ease the party-goers out of your house by providing lifts. By teatime you should have emptied the house.

Now you will be on your knees. Have a hot bath and retire to bed.

In two days’ time you will once again feel human. And your teenager will be asking when they can have their next party.